Defense Technology International - December 2007 - (Page 50)

INSIGHT EDITORIAL W Pork Might Fly est Virginia is the latest subject of Lord-knows-how-many press releases from Northrop Grumman, touting the economic beneﬁts that will fall from the sky like life-giving rain if the Pentagon picks the KC-30 as the U.S. Air Force’s new tanker. That is, of course, West Virginia, as in the home state of Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, nicknamed the “Prince of Pork.” So far, the KC-30 project has been sliced and diced to serve the constituents of legislators in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Carol i n a , O h i o, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, West Virginia, Virginia, Georgia, New Mexico and Tennessee. Twelve of those 14 states are in the South —Illinois and Ohio owe their inclusion to the fact that electronic warfare systems or turbofan engines aren’t made below the Mason-Dixon Line—and 10 are in the lower half of the 50 states in terms of per-capita GDP. This led a bipartisan group of Southern governors in October to call for the elimination of political bias from the competition, arguing that the KC-30 proposal “was the ﬁrst time that the defense industry had proposed sourcing, assembling and modifying a U.S. Air Force aircraft in the South.” Sorry, Texas, as in Fort Worth. So long, Georgia, where Marietta is located, last time we looked. You are now Yankees. But on the upside, you can claim victory in the Civil War. As for eliminating political bias: Suck it up and admit defeat, because it’s not going to happen. Not surprisingly, Washington and Kansas are missing from the list of KC-30 largesse because that’s where major work on the rival Boeing KC-767 would be carried out. California is also absent, possibly because its loyalty to the one aerospace giant that still maintains its headquarters in downtown L.A. is a given. The only novel feature of this assiduous pork-barreling is its in-your-face blatancy. On the other hand, desperate times call for desperate measures. However much Northrop Grumman may try to avoid using the F-word—a search for KC-30 and that word on the Integrated Systems news site trawls up one press release, datelined Le Bourget— the A330 is built by a company headquartered in France. Yes, we said it. FRANCE. Northrop Grumman has been laboring throughout this competition against the widespread perception that what Congress wants is a free and fair tanker competition . . . that Boeing wins. Meanwhile, Boeing’s lobbying campaign is as intense, even playing the race card by enlisting Latino labor unions that have raised ethical questions about EADS. In military terms, Northrop Grumman is ﬁghting a maneuver campaign against Boeing. Through the long and grisly story of the project, Boeing’s allies have been legislators in Kansas and Washington, states where Boeing planned from the outset to do most of the work on the KC767. Now, Boeing is obligated to dance with them that brung them and can’t emulate its rivals’ Johnny Appleseed approach. So far, too, there seems to be one omission from both campaigns’ target lists: Pennsylvania, home of the “Earl of Earmarks,” Democratic Rep. John Murtha. But that surely will be put right before long. A parallel campaign afflicts USAF’s strategic airlift planning, as politicians from Georgia, Delaware and Massachusetts—whose constituents modernize and repair C-5s—have written a law to prevent USAF from retiring the unreliable jets and replacing them with C-17s. USAF, Lockheed Martin and Congress have their own versions of how much it will cost to re-engine all the C-5s and ﬁt them with new electronics, and how much that will improve reliability and productivity. But if USAF is right, re-engining is a poor investment. The same money would generate more airlift capacity if spent on new C-17s. But as the tanker war grinds on and on, you cannot envy the lot of the poor saps who eventually have to choose a tanker and deal with the inevitable protests (and then possibly ﬂee the country or enroll in the Witness Protection Program). The philosophical problem is that it is hard to construct a rational case for selecting one aircraft or the other. The differences between them are outweighed by their similarities, and which works better depends on how USAF uses or needs tankers in the next 40-plus years. And not even a member of Congress knows how that’s going to work out. I —Bill Sweetman Read Sweetman’s posts on DTI’s weblog, Ares, updated daily: AviationWeek.com/ares www.aviationweek.com/dti 50 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL DECEMBER 2007 http://AviationWeek.com/ares http://www.aviationweek.com/dti

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Defense Technology International - December 2007

Defense Technology International - December 2007 Contents Around the World Science Watch Tech Watch BrahMos: Ramjet Ship Killer r-e-s-p-e-c-t Deja Vu Trump Card Dubai Demos Agile Helos Joint Force Online Charge UGVs Creep, Crawl to Victory Sweet Ride Fast, Lethal Ship Defense Networking Stealth: Why Raptors Can't Talk The Net Cutting Edge First Person In Review Insight

Defense Technology International - December 2007

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